A Matter of Taste: Tea, Opium, and Trade Monopolies in Tibet

This article chronicles the British Indian state’s attempt, and eventual failure, to break the Chinese monopoly on trading tea in Tibet at the very time Britain replaced Qing China as the largest exporter of tea on the global stage. I explore this short history by analysing the trade marts established in Tibet and the eastern Himalayas between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not simply as centres of imperial trade between two powerful empires, but as occupied territories meant to form key nodes on land networks throughout the Tibetan plateau and highlands. Following its failure to push Indian tea into Tibetan markets, the British government in India experimented with the sale of opium in British-controlled marts in Tibet, thus marking important continuities in commodity trade competition with China across market spheres. The competition between Chinese and Indian tea has been richly documented as a narrative of ascendancy and industrial modernisation that rapidly reshaped global imperial hierarchies as well as local socio-cultural relationships (including those of labour accumulation). By contrast, the British failure in Tibet highlights how militarised frontier-making alone advanced market capitalism throughout the trans-Himalayan theatre. This article demonstrates how the exigencies of war propaganda and imperial frontier-making shaped not only the spatial and cultural frames of tea consumption in Tibet, but the territorial entities of the Himalayan “borderlands”, and indeed, “Tibet” itself.